


Kith and Kin

by Syrena_of_the_lake



Category: Jaran Series - Kate Elliott
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Found Family, Gen, Siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-18 11:09:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21843136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Syrena_of_the_lake/pseuds/Syrena_of_the_lake
Summary: Tess grew up in the shadow of the Chapalii Empire — and of her brother Charles, the most famous human alive, who wages a secret war for freedom. On the primitive planet Rhui, Tess and her adopted brother Yuri fight for their lives. This much is canon. The AU begins here: Yuri lives, and Charles comes, and Tess is in the middle.
Relationships: Tess Soerensen & Charles Soerensen, Tess Soerensen & Yuri Orzhekov, Tess Soerensen/Ilya Bakhtiian
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Kith and Kin

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lyras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lyras/gifts).



> I’m delighted to find someone else who loves this book as much as I do! Long live Yuri — seriously, I’ve gone full AU here. I hope you enjoy :-)

_Your love lifts my soul from the body to the sky_

_And you lift me up out of the two worlds_

— Rumi

* * *

Intellectually, Tess knew the saber fight was over quickly. But the moment when Yuri slid from his saddle seemed interminable. And Tess’s own body betrayed her when she dismounted to help him. Guard him. Cradle him in her arms, one of which was numb and useless.

“Don’t leave me,” she pleaded. And then, when she felt him slipping away (or was she the one being borne aloft on the wind, on wafts of ulyan spice?), she screamed it to the skies. 

Their blood mingled on the bare ground.

“Tess,” said a horrified voice, but it was not Yuri’s.

“Ilya?” Tess didn’t know whether her husband was truly there, or just a hallucination, but she gripped his shirt and rubbed the embroidery with her thumb and he _felt_ real. 

“Don’t burn him,” she cried. Which was absurd — she didn’t really believe in an immortal soul or reincarnation — but hadn’t Nico said that without belief there was no jaran? And she was jaran now, more than Terran. Wasn’t it funny that they rhymed? Oh yes, she was jaran, by adoption and by marriage and by choice and by everything that mattered, and Tess opened her mouth to try to tell Ilya but the words flew away like birds (another rhyme, only in Anglais, not khush), and she could not catch them. So she repeated the most important part, for Tess could not bear to be parted from her brother now that she had found him.

“Don’t burn him.” 

She never heard Ilya’s reply.

* * *

Yurinya Orzhekov was burning.

Somewhere far away, his sister Tess screamed his name.

The blessed coolness of air bore him upward, like a swift horse or sacred bird skimming over the plains.

The fire banked.

When Yuri awoke from the fever-dream, he expected to see Tess at his side. Instead there was Ilya, looking drawn and diminished and nothing like himself. Fierce Ilya, who now avoided his eyes like he would a woman’s. 

By all the gods, what had _happened_?

“Tess,” he croaked.

Ilya shook his head minutely. “She burns with a fever that will not break.” His knuckles were white where they gripped Yuri’s bedframe. “She thought you were dead. She was pleading with me not to burn your body. Now she burns instead.”

* * *

Tess was sailing. No, she was flying. Only she was enclosed by pale walls, and could not feel the wind burn her cheeks.

What was the point, if she could not feel the wind?

“I miss my brother,” she said aloud, just to hear the words ring in the emptiness. Not like the emptiness of the plains — here there was no grass, no wind, no birds, no horses, only the quiet thrum of engines and an utter absence of movement. 

“I am here,” Charles said from nowhere.

“No.” Tess shook her head sadly. “Not you.”

The dream changed.

Riders in blood-red shirts charged through the stars, dispelling nebulae with swift cuts of their sabers. The galaxy trembled with the pounding of hooves. An alien tent sat, immobile, at the center of swirling stardust kicked up by the horses. The jaran dashed themselves to pieces on the solid walls of that unyielding tent. Kheppeli magic. Chapalii technology.

“It will swallow you!” cried Tess, but the wind tore her voice away.

The dream changed. 

Tess was eight years old again. She idolized her brother Charles. He never had time to play with her, but he gave her puzzles — strange letters with little curls painted in inks that shifted color with the changing light. Tess spent hours tracing them, finding patterns, unwrapping the alien shapes until she found meaning in them. The first time she unknowingly cracked the code of court Chapalii, her brother took her out for ice cream. Just the two of them. And furtive photographers and fawning waiters and the knowing nods and fervent whispers about the long haul.

Tess shivered.

The dream changed.

Wind danced in the tall grasses. They rippled, split like waves breaking on a far shore, and reunited with wordless whispers. A whistler called. A few low clouds scudded across the deepening sky.

Tess could breathe again.

* * *

“She is resting easier,” said Yuri. Hope caught in his voice and it cracked like a growing boy’s. 

“How can you tell?” Ilya’s voice cracked like the ground after a long drought, and Yuri could not tell whether his dyan and his cousin spoke in demand or plea. It unsettled Yuri more even than Tess’s pallor or delirious ramblings about the stars. Surely she was too stubborn to die? She was so much like Ilya, like a fierce hawk on the wing, looking down on the rest of them from unfathomable heights...

Yuri gripped Tess’s hand and willed her to squeeze back. “She is my sister,” he said. “I just know.” He was sure that Ilya would see through his confident words to the desperation beneath them. 

But Ilya only closed his eyes. “She is my wife, and I cannot tell.”

And that frightened Yuri more than anything else had since Tess first crumpled in the saddle, her blood darkening her red tunic, her eyes seeking the sky.

 _Don’t let her burn_ , Yuri implored the gods. He did not care if it was sacrilege. They could not have sent Tess to him from so far away only to part them after such a short time. 

The gods were silent, and so was Tess, but the wind sang in the grasses. Perhaps that was sign enough.

* * *

Two days later, the Prince of Jeds arrived. 

Yuri did not know which surprised him more: that the Prince was Tess’s brother, that the Prince found them in the middle of the plains at the shrine of Morava, or that Ilya had known what Yuri did not. 

“You could have told me,” he murmured to Tess in gentle reproach. “I am your brother too.”

The Prince had brought a woman doctor from Jeds, who treated Tess with tenderness and Ilya and his jahar with stony silence. She muttered in a language that was not Rhuian, but Yuri knew the sound of a woman cursing. The doctor reminded him of his sister Sonja.

Yuri wished Sonja were there. She would have Tess awake and walking and cursing and laughing, and together the women would run interference between Ilya and the Prince of Jeds so Yuri wouldn’t draw the force of their combined ire. 

“I’m not good at this, Tess.” Yuri traced a pattern on the blanket that covered her prone figure. “I feel like a whistler trying to make peace between two hawks.”

Later he would wonder if his words had conjured the storm that followed. He would never know where he found the words to make Ilyakoria Bakhtiian flinch into silence. But Ilya and Charles, the Prince of Jeds, were at each other’s throats — practically ready to declare war over Tess. And Yuri knew Tess better even than these strong, proud men who each held such claim on her heart.

Tess hated war.

“Fighting over a woman as if she did not have the right to choose her own path — for shame, Ilya!” Yuri stood in Tess’s doorway and dared to refuse her own husband entrance. It was easier to bar the way to Charles, a stranger, than to his own kin and chosen leader. But some loyalties ran deeper still.

“A woman has no choice in marriage,” snapped Ilya, but his words were a reflex and held little conviction. Yuri’s challenge had struck home.

“Marriage?” Prince Charles paled.

“Yes. Tess is my wife.” Ilya held himself as stiff and remote as stone.

But Charles’s face was even colder. “Did she consent to this?”

Ilya didn’t even flinch, damn his eyes. “It is done.”

“Do the Chapalii know of it?” The Prince of Jeds betrayed the first unguarded emotion Yuri had seen from him since he’d first seen Tess in her sickbed.

Yuri knew the khaja were savages, but the fact that the Prince valued Tess’s marital status over her life made him sick.

“What if they do?” Ilya had recovered a semblance of calm. 

“Damnit, then she loses all rights as my heir!” Charles set his jaw. “Did you marry her for her birthright?”

“Gods, no!” Ilya actually laughed. “If I want Jeds, I will take it.”

Yuri put his head in his hands. _Wake up, Tess_ , he pled silently. 

Later, he would wonder which of their gods answered his prayer — but in truth it was an idle thought. When Tess woke, they shared one joy, and that was all that mattered.

* * *

Tess woke, and her worlds collided.

“Ilya,” she gasped first in profound relief, and then out of sheer astonishment: “Charles?”

Dizzy, her gaze bounced around the room and landed on the one face she never thought to see again. With a wordless cry, Tess launched herself at Yuri, stumbling out of weakness, crying and laughing by turns as he caught her.

The world fuzzed. Tess really, really hoped she hadn’t fainted. She didn’t think so, else Ilya wouldn’t be smiling so broadly.

“If you were any other man, cousin, I’d kill you for usurping my wife’s attentions.” 

“Usurping?” repeated Yuri, laughing. Tess drank in the sight: her brother, whole and happy and alive.

 _They didn’t burn him_ , she thought wildly. _He came back to me_.

“It means to take over, like the story of Vadislaev and the ninth tent,” explained Ilya. Belatedly, Tess realized they were speaking Rhuian.

“Oh gods,” she said in khush.

Yuri ruffled her hair. Ilya looked at her fondly — and possessively, and they would have to have words about that (her cheeks heated at the thought of that argument, and what would follow). And Charles... Charles looked at her as if he had never seen her before.

“Shit on a koehn,” Tess swore in khush.

Yuri’s eyes widened. “You didn’t learn that from me!” He looked at Ilya.

“Sonja,” the jaran men said in unison.

“Tess,” implored Charles in Anglais. “What were you thinking?”

Ilya could not possibly have understood the words, but he frowned forbiddingly at Charles’ tone. “You no longer have any claim over her,” he declared. Then, with a swift (and guilty? could it be?) glance at Tess, he added, faltering, “except whatever claim she wishes to acknowledge as hers.”

Tess sat in silence, fumbling for words in the tangled knot of languages and loyalties that had suddenly taken hold of her brain. And gods, but she felt so weak. How long had she been unconscious? How long had Charles been there? How in the everlasting plains had he found her in the first place? How—

“Out!” declared Yuri in his atrocious Rhuian accent, interrupting her whirling thoughts. “Tess needs rest. Both of you leave now.”

Ilya bowed his head in deference. Tess looked at him, bewildered. What had happened between her brother and her husband while she slept? Yuri had never dared speak so to Ilya before.

Charles, of course, deferred to no one. “I am her brother,” he declared. No other reason followed it. Who would need one? A Chapalii would have given way immediately.

Yuri did not. “You may be her blood, but I am her brother by gift and by choice, and I order you out of my sister’s tent!”

Tess felt as warm and safe as she ever had in all the worlds she had called home. Still, it wouldn’t do to let Yuri get too full of himself. “This isn’t a tent,” she pointed out — but only once a bemused Charles had finally allowed himself to be escorted out of her sickroom. Stone walls and a real bed... they were clearly still at the shrine of Morava. 

Tess missed the open sky.

“I need to practice my Rhuian,” said Yuri ruefully. “All I could think of was tent or castle, nothing in between.”

Which was dreadfully ironic, considering the dichotomy Tess had been avoiding for months. Wife of Ilya, or sister of Charles? She had to choose, but everything within her rebelled at the necessity.

Yuri squeezed her arm. “I have missed you,” he said seriously.

Tess’s laugh was watery. “I can’t imagine practicing Rhuian with Ilya is much fun.”

“No. He does not teach me any dirty songs.”

Then they laughed until they cried, and Tess thanked the gods in khush — or God in Anglais, or the stars or the wind or whatever governed the fates — that whatever the future held, she would meet it with her brother Yuri at her side. Yuri, who valued her always and only for herself, the lonely woman who followed khepelli pilgrims across the trackless plains and stumbled into a new family in the jaran. 

“I’ve missed you too,” she whispered. “All my life, until I found you.”

“Don’t worry, Tess. We will keep finding each other, in this life and the next. You and me and Sonja — and as for Ilya! He would follow you into the underworld.” Yuri smiled, but his eyes were solemn. 

Tess sighed. “But not Charles.”

“He followed you here. That must count for something.”

Tess leaned forward to hug Yuri fiercely. “You followed me first — you and Ilya. That counts for more.”

Yuri tweaked her nose. “Technically, you followed us across the plains — for days!” He paused, and a wondering look came over his face. “You found us, Tess. You will always find your way home, now.”

Outside the open window, a whistler sang its evening song — which Tess had always heard as _coming-home-home-home_ , and her heart soared in answer.


End file.
